24 Hours by Greg Iles Read Free Book Online

the cylinder home and walked to the bedroom door, steeling herself with each step, clenching the pistol’s checked grip like a lifeline. She was about to face the man who had taken Abby, and she would do whatever was necessary to make him give her back. There was no room for hesitation. Or for mercy.
    She quietly opened the door, then edged along the hallway toward the rectangle of light that was the kitchen door. Her breath coming in little pants, she stopped just outside the door and peered into the kitchen.
    Joe Hickey was sitting calmly at the kitchen table, drinking from one of the glasses of tea. The realization that she had made that tea for Abby brought a lump to Karen’s throat. She stepped into the kitchen, raised the gun, and aimed it at his face.
    “Where’s my daughter?”
    Hickey swallowed some tea and slowly set down the glass. “You don’t want to shoot me, Karen. Can I call you Karen?”
    She shook the .38 at him. “Where’s my little girl!”
    “Abby is perfectly safe. However, if you shoot me, she’ll be stone-dead within thirty minutes. And there won’t be a thing I can do about it.”
    “Tell me what’s happening!”
    “Listen carefully, Karen. This is a kidnapping-for-ransom. Okay? It’s about money. M-O-N-E-Y. That’s all. So, the last thing I want is for anything to happen to your precious little girl.”
    “Where is Abby right now ?”
    “With my cousin. His name’s Huey. Right after you got here, I passed her outside and Huey drove her off in his pickup truck. He’s got a cell phone with him. . . .”
    Hickey kept talking, but Karen couldn’t make sense of the words. She couldn’t get past the image he’d just described. Abby alone with a stranger. She’d be whimpering in terror, crying for her mother. Karen felt as though she had been pushed from a great height, her stomach rolling over and over as she went into free fall.
    “Are you listening, Karen? I said, if I don’t call Huey every thirty minutes, he’ll kill her. He won’t want to, but he will. That’s rule number two. So don’t get any crazy ideas about calling the police. It would take them an hour just to get me fingerprinted and into lockup, and by the time I saw a pay phone, Abby would be lying dead beside the highway.”
    Karen snapped out of her trance.
    “But that’s not going to happen,” Hickey said, smiling. “You’re a smart girl. And Huey’s a good boy. Loves kids. He’s practically a kid himself. But he’s a little slow. Since I’m the only person who was ever nice to him, he always does exactly what I tell him. So you want to be real careful with that gun.”
    Karen looked at the weapon in her hand. Suddenly it seemed more of a threat to Abby than to the man in front of her.
    “You pick things up real quick, I can tell,” Hickey said. “So keep paying attention. This is a kidnapping-for-ransom, like I said. But it’s not like you’ve seen on TV or in the movies. This isn’t the Lindbergh baby. It’s not some Exxon executive, buried-alive bullshit. This is a work of art. A perfect crime. I know, because I’ve done it five times before and I haven’t been caught yet. Not even a whiff of Johnny Law.”
    Karen pointed to Hickey’s left arm, where the poorly inked needlework showed below the band of his sleeve. An eagle holding an iron cross in its talons. “Isn’t that a prison tattoo?”
    Hickey’s face tightened, then relaxed. “They busted me for something else. How’d you know that was done in the joint?”
    “I don’t know.” Karen had seen several tattoos like it on surgical patients in the OR. “I just know.”
    “You’re smarter than the average June Cleaver, aren’t you? Well, it won’t help you any. I own you, lady. And your little girl. You need to remember that.”
    Karen forced back fresh tears, unwilling to give Hickey the satisfaction of seeing them. The gun wavered in her hand. She steadied it.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “What happened